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This is Alan Minsky, live in studio at KPFK Radio.
I'm joined now in studio by Scott Horton of Antiwar.com.
We're going to shift our focus to the really other huge story in the news, which is the WikiLeaks 92,000 documents that have been uncovered to the public, available on the Internet through the site WikiLeaks.
Basically stuff that the Defense Department, the U.S. military wanted nobody to see, except for themselves, and now they are available to the public.
So first question I have for you, Scott Horton, before we're joined by Eric Margolis, who is on the line to join us.
You probably are the one person that I know who knows as much information about how things are on the ground in Afghanistan, of a nature that the general public is basically clueless about.
I mean, you are just yourself.
Your mind is like a repository of such information.
So for you, how significant are these 92,000 documents that are now available through WikiLeaks?
Well, I haven't had too much time to go through them all, Alan, but from what I've seen just looking at them and from the stories that have been picked up by The Guardian and The New York Times and Der Spiegel that were the original recipients, it looks pretty significant.
And, of course, just that number, 92,000 documents, this is obviously, clearly, the largest intelligence leak in the history of the world right here, and it's going to take a while to dig through.
But I think the significance really is in, I hope, that the coverage of the kinds of stories that are buried in these secret reports that have been released will, you know, bring the rest of the people of the country right about up to speed where I am, which is simply that it is a lost cause.
It's been a lost cause.
And as the military makes clear in these documents, they've known it's a lost cause this whole time.
Now, we probably won't get driven out of there with a fleeing the roof of the Saigon Embassy hanging onto the skids of the helicopters type of a scene there.
Our soldiers can direct firepower outwards long enough to hold on to Kabul as long as they're determined to.
But can they ever conquer that country?
Can they ever build a nation in that country?
Absolutely not.
And I think that that has become much more clear with this release.
Well, Scott Horton, take it away from there.
And we're joined on the line by our second guest this hour, Eric Margolis.
Eric is the author of War at the Top of the World and American Raj.
His website is ericmargolis.com.
He's been covering wars all around the world for more than a generation.
He covered the Afghan war in the 1980s when the Mujahideen were the good guys fighting against the Soviet Union.
In person.
And oftentimes when I ask him about these warlords, he actually knows them and can tell you some pretty frightening stories.
Welcome to the show, Eric.
How are you?
Thanks, Scott.
That was a very good analysis, by the way, the Wikipedia that you just gave.
Well, yeah, I sure hope that it's the case.
And, you know, this is something that we'll be talking more about with Tom Englehart in a few minutes.
But this is really, I think, the question on all the people in the anti-war community's mind, which is how much of a difference is this really going to make?
When the Pentagon Papers hit, that was it.
Night and day.
Everything is different now.
The history of the world.
When you say Pentagon Papers, everybody knows what that means.
Are we to expect that kind of effect from this document dump?
I don't think so.
I wish it would.
You know, all wars are bloody and horrible and vicious and marked with atrocities.
And the most atrocious ones of all are these kind of post-colonial wars, guerrilla fighting, fighting amongst civilian populations.
And this side of the war has been concealed from the American public very effectively by the military and the government.
So we're getting a peep in it.
But now it's up to the media to exploit this, as just said.
I really doubt that the media will, because the media is so self-censoring these days and so fawning on governments that the media right across North America, with some exceptions, that they may soft-soak this whole issue and play it down.
It's complex and nobody's going to read through the thing.
Oh, yeah, some things went wrong.
But by and large, unless the media really goes after this, I don't think American public opinion will change that much now.
It will in the long run.
It seems like the public is basically opposed.
I think it's about 60% against.
But it's the lowest priority on their list.
They care about it very little, it seems.
That's quite right.
That's what the polls show us.
There's no sense of outrage or anger.
There's no, you know, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?
That kind of thing that I remember vividly from Vietnam, when I used to wear the American Army uniform and people used to spit at me.
It was a horrible experience.
Today you don't see this.
And that's typical of these distant, what I call modern imperial wars.
They are hermetically sealed.
The journalists are completely controlled over these so-called embedded reporters.
And the major media knows exactly what to say and what not to say.
So we're back really in an Orwellian phase where we're waging these distant wars.
We hear reports of distant and great enemies abroad.
But you don't see much more than that.
You don't see people being blown to pieces on television and entire villages wiped out.
Well, you know, it seemed like TV news took about, I don't know, at least 12 hours before they could get their memos together about how they were supposed to report this.
And then apparently the same memo went out to all the channels, Eric, because everybody's agreed that there's only one thing to learn from this story, and that is that those duplicitous Pakistanis, they've been working against us this whole time.
Are we the one by now?
Scott, you should retire from radio and become a mind reader.
I was just thinking the same thing as I was watching the main news channels this evening.
It was all those wicked, nefarious Pakistanis.
It's all their fault.
If they would only cooperate and fight fair, we wouldn't have this problem.
Well, the Pakistani story of duplicity is much more complicated than that.
We're like babes in the woods there in South Asia.
We don't understand what we're doing, and the Pakistanis do understand what they're doing.
And for us, nobody should be surprised that Pakistan has been playing both sides of the street.
Anybody who does is a fool.
Well, why would the Pakistani military be interested in helping the Taliban work against America and Afghanistan?
They are our allies, after all.
Well, there are reluctant, involuntary allies in the sense that in 2001, the administration came to Pakistan, according to President Musharraf and according to the Director General of ISI, Pakistani Intelligence, who told me personally, General Mahmood that was, that the senior American officials said either we're going to bomb you back to the Stone Age or you have to cooperate.
And that cooperation meant opening all the Pakistani bases to American use, using the ISI intelligence for American uses, and allowing American troops and aircraft to operate out of Pakistan, and essentially declaring war on Taliban and isolating it.
This was completely inimical to Pakistan's national interest.
Pakistan created Taliban.
Taliban was Pakistan's arm in Afghanistan, fighting the Afghan Communist Party, which was backed by the Russians, and the Indians, and the Iranians.
And so now the U.S. is saying, okay, abandon the Taliban.
Well, the Pakistanis are too smart to do that.
So what they did, they're under tremendous American pressure.
They're under threat of being bombed back to the Stone Age.
They're also being bombarded with a billion dollars a year of U.S. aid in a very poor country.
So the Pakistanis said, well, we'll pretend to cooperate with the Americans, but we'll also hedge our bets with Taliban, because one day the Americans are going to pack up and go home.
They're going to be defeated in Afghanistan, and we have to have some levers of control when they leave, and that's called Taliban.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Eric Margulies.
He's the author of American Raj, Liberation or Domination, and we're talking about the revelations available at Wikileaks.org, The New York Times, that's NewYorkTimes.com, and of course Guardian.co.uk, as well as Der Spiegel in Germany.
They have received all of the 92,000 documents put out by Wikileaks yesterday, and if you go to antiwar.com slash blog, you can find a link right to the HTML files, the easy for your internet browser to look at files there, at Wikileaks.org.
And now, well, let's put aside the Pakistan strategy question for a minute and talk about some of the revelations about this Task Force 373, and this is part of the war that's been in secret this whole time.
I guess this means Delta Force and other Navy SEALs and other special forces guys, along with, according to these documents, what they call other governmental organization, which means mercenaries working for the CIA.
Eric, what are they up to over there?
Well, they're doing just what the death squads in Central America did in the 1980s when I was covering the war in Nicaragua.
They are in El Salvador.
They're going out, assassinating people who they're believed to or suspected of supporting Taliban.
It's a kind of a terror campaign.
They're trying to intimidate tribes and villages, and they attack targets at night, these special Delta Force, or these American Rambo groups come in at night and kick down doors and shoot people, and most of the, from what we understand, most of the casualties are civilians.
And they're running around.
What's also preposterous, in my view, as a former soldier, is that these groups, until very recently, did not answer to the American central commanders in Afghanistan.
They were completely independent under these joint special operations groups that become the golden hair boys in the Pentagon, and they're running around doing their own law, creating their own policies, interfacing with CIA or with the regular Army or Air Force and Navy units.
It's a crazy situation, these out-of-control Rambos.
And now, as you just said, we've just found out from a tremendous expose from the Washington Post about the enormity of all these mercenary groups that the U.S. has set up, the Bush administration set up, who are also running their own private wars.
In fact, some estimates say that there may be as many American paid mercenaries in Afghanistan today as there are American troops.
There may be around 100,000.
And who knows what they're doing?
They are completely out of control, even in the words of Defense Secretary Gates.
Yeah, it kind of makes you wonder what would happen if we did bring them all home.
It would be pretty scary.
You remember the great movie, Seven Days in May?
I keep referring to it.
It's about a potential military coup in the U.S. using one of these obscure anti-terrorist outfits, I think it was called Contel-Inpro or something like that, who are going to seize Washington.
It's not something that the American republic should tolerate.
Yeah, well, all they'd have to do is walk across the river.
It's something that the American empire is at least taking a chance with, if we're not right at the edge of it.
I don't know why not to let us just keep electing Bushes and Obamas from now on.
What difference does it make?
Now, Seymour Hersh recently talked about actual executions.
I guess The Guardian uses the term assassinations, talking about these mercenary and CIA teams and JSOC teams going around killing people.
Are they actually putting people on their knees and just shooting them in the back of the head, Eric?
Yes, it has happened, for sure.
They're also using heavy weapons like Hellfire missiles and 2,000-pound bombs, if a Taliban is seen near some village, they go to the old reprisal story.
They go and drop a 2,000-pound bomb on the village, and all the villages that were killed are listed as enemy militants, and Taliban or Al-Qaeda or whatever the case.
It's very brutal.
I mean, all guerrilla warfare are like this, and unfortunately the U.S. Army lacks the sensitivity that, for example, the British had in Malaya to conduct a skillful rapier-like counter-guerrilla war.
The Americans, who are young people from the south of the United States, they don't have any sensitivity for the culture or where they are in Afghanistan, are just rampaging around.
They're angry.
They want revenge.
It's a very nasty situation.
We only know the tip of the iceberg on this story.
Well, now, General McChrystal, as was reported by Michael Hastings in Rolling Stone, had a ratio, they called it the McChrystal Ratio.
For everybody we kill, we create 10 new enemies, he said.
For every 10, we create 100 new enemies.
And it seems like the same thing could be said for just the number of troops and mercenaries in the country.
The more we escalate, the more reaction we get, and I wonder whether that's not obvious to everyone, even including the Pentagon, and whether maybe that's not the plan.
Let's go ahead and bomb a few wedding parties here and there and escalate the war, create more reaction.
It's just excuse for more war.
Oh, I don't think the Pentagon is that subtle.
They're just trying to bomb and shoot their way out of the predicament into which they've fallen.
There are a lot of American soldiers who are against this war and the high-ranking officers in the Pentagon who think it's wrong-headed and it's going to wreck the U.S. Army.
And the defense budget.
But, you know, this is the nature of this kind of guerrilla war, and it's very stressful on the soldiers who are there.
They don't know who their enemies are.
And what's also important, I remember when I was there and the Soviets were rampaging around, every move the Soviet Army made was telegraphed in advance, 24 hours in advance, to the mujahideen, the fathers of today's Taliban.
And why?
Because the Soviets had to rely on local Afghan dishwashers, bottle washers, radio people, translators, drivers, laundry men, et cetera, and they were all reporting back to Taliban in a secret intelligence network, and that's the case.
Number two, as you just said, and very true, the more troops the Soviets sent in, the more resistance they met from the Afghans, who were very leisurely fighters.
They don't mind if they have to fight for 50 years.
They enjoy war.
Well, same thing.
As the Americans have escalated the war, more and more Afghans have gone out to fight and resist them.
All right.
Well, now, so let's just end with this.
It's Eric Margulies, author of American Raj.
Richard Haass, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, has a piece in Newsweek this week that says, that's it, let's go.
Is that indicative of any major truths we ought to know, or it's just one more former bureaucrat?
Well, no.
Haass is a level-headed chap.
I remember him from Washington.
I respect for him.
He's very establishment.
I mean, he's the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, which is from where all our foreign policy establishment is taken.
It's the womb of the foreign policy establishment.
And so when Haass calls for withdrawal, leaving behind drones and CIA killer teams and things like that, even so by withdrawing the bulk of American troops, it is very significant in my view because it shows a change of heart in the American foreign policy establishment.
So the realization that this is an unwinnable war that's going to bankrupt the United States, and it also can end up destroying NATO as well.
Well, maybe there's a silver lining after all.
All right, everybody, that is Eric Margulies.
He's the author of War at the Top of the World and American Raj.
His website is ericmargulies.com.
Thanks very much for your time on the show.
I really appreciate it.
Thank you, Scott.
And we've been listening to Scott Horton talking with Eric Margulies here on KPFK Radio.
Antonio Gonzalez, host of Strategy Session, will be back at this hour next week.
I am KPFK Interim Program Director Alan Minsky.
And when we come right back from a short break, we have a very important birthday announcement, and then Scott will be talking with Tom Engelhardt.
He of tomdispatch.com about the WikiLeaks story.
And in about 15 minutes, we're going to ask for listeners to call in to talk to us about the WikiLeaks story at 818-985-5735.
So we'll be opening up the phone lines to talk about this huge story impacting U.S. foreign policy.
And right now, Scott Horton from antiwar.com is going to be talking with Tom Engelhardt.
Thanks, Alan.
Scott Horton here.
I've got Tom Engelhardt on the line.
Of course, he's better known as Tom Dispatch all around the web.
TomDispatch.com is his site.
And, of course, we run pretty much everything he writes at antiwar.com.
That's original.antiwar.com slash Engelhardt.
And he's got a brand-new book out, which I highly recommend.
It's really – well, it's as good as all of his books, and they're all really good.
It's called The American Way of War.
It's on the shelves and on Amazon.com right now.
Welcome to the show, Tom.
How are you?
Hey, Scott.
Always good to be with you.
Well, I'm very happy to have you here.
Now, so let's talk about this story.
The biggest national security leak ever, I understand.
92,000 documents leaked, perhaps by Bradley Manning, the young specialist who is alleged to have leaked the collateral murder video, the Apache helicopter Iraq massacre video.
It was a Reuters reporter and his cameraman were among those killed.
Well, I guess let me start with that.
Do we know yet, or is that what all the word is?
That this is part of the Bradley Manning leak?
I think that's the assumption, but we don't really know.
We just don't.
And quite correctly, WikiLeaks isn't telling, and they shouldn't.
We're really not sure.
But we do know that at least the head of WikiLeaks is claiming that what's already happened, the stuff they've released, has gotten them even more leaks.
We have the equivalent from the inside, maybe the U.S. military, U.S. intelligence community, hard to know.
Maybe the equivalent, as Andrew Bacevich said this today blogging at the New Republic, of a new kind of insurgency aimed from within the U.S., either military, intelligence community, whatever, at stopping the Afghan war.
And that's actually interesting.
Yeah, well, and I think it was just last week, late last week, Julian Assange, who's the public face of WikiLeaks, did a surprise appearance at the TED Talk conference.
And according to CNN anyway, he said there that they have gotten a ton of high-caliber disclosures, his words, high-caliber disclosures, since the collateral murder video.
And so, you know, it seems like Bradley Manning sure set the precedent for people.
And he proved that WikiLeaks can keep a secret.
It's true, and you know, you would think that a democratic administration that undoubtedly would hail Daniel Ellsberg, the guy who leaked in the Vietnam period the Pentagon Papers, as a kind of a hero, you know, in the Watergate moment, would look positively on this.
But of course, we know they haven't.
They've released a whole series of, this is the Obama administration, a whole series of statements that are rather contradictory and reasonably appalling.
You know, they've harmed national security.
I mean, we have so much secrecy in this country right now.
For anybody who read that Top Secret America three-piece Washington Post thing last week, we have so much secrecy that nobody knows how much there is.
Nobody knows how much money we spend on it.
Nobody knows how much office space the intelligence community has.
Nobody knows really how many reports they put out, although the Washington Post suggested that they put out 50,000 reports a year, which is literally unreadable.
Nobody can keep up from within the government.
I mean, we are in a world of secrecy.
So any organization, and particularly what functionally is a stateless media organization, pushing back against that, it's quite an interesting phenomenon.
Well, and it's ironic, too, that there's so much secrecy, and there has been for so long, that the government does things in that secrecy that if they were shown to the light of day, really would cause harm to national security, like if they released the rest of the torture pictures, and that's why Obama has kept them secret.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's true, of course.
I mean, we have to keep the actual leak in some perspective.
You know, it is not, in fact, the Pentagon Papers.
For those who remember the Pentagon Papers, what Ellsberg released was basically a study about and documents from the top war planners.
These things are basically coming from Army and intelligence people in the field.
So these things reflect the frustration of a bunch of people conducting a failing war, and that is different, and I would say also for people, and I think it's important that this is out, it's a major story, but for people who have been following the war, if you look at at least what the New York Times and the Guardian say are the crucial issues, the crucial things revealed, you're not going to be completely shocked.
I mean, deep corruption, Taliban doing better than expected, many more civilian casualties unreported than at the hands of the Americans and the NATO forces than expected, and so on and so forth.
I mean, it adds something, but it's not...
I think the real news in some ways, for me, is that it's the second time in the last month, the other time obviously being the McChrystal-Petraeus events, McChrystal's firing and Petraeus' hiring, the second time that Afghanistan, in the worst possible light, has been blasted onto the front pages of the American papers, and to the top of the TV news.
And that, I think, is important.
Well, as one of McChrystal's men told Michael Hastings in that Rolling Stone piece, the more the American people know about it, the less they support it.
No, I think this will increase in the opinion polls, I don't know about on the streets at all, but in the opinion polls, I think this will in fact...
I think you're going to see, this is putting more pressure on the Obama administration.
I think the other thing that's interesting, for those who bothered to look at the New York Times version of this, and the British Guardian version of this, because Wikileaks gave access to three organizations, those two, and Der Spiegel, the German paper, that also tells you something interesting, because if you just started reading on the front page, more or less, of each paper, in my case, it's the front screen of the Guardian, but the front page of the New York Times, you would almost think that the reporters of those papers had been given access to two different sets of documents.
Oh, really?
How so?
Because the Times basically begins its pieces, in essence, Pakistan betrays us.
That's the basic message.
You have to make your way from the front page, the Times ran its stuff on four column pages inside, you have to make your way off the front page, and through two four column pages, and deep into a third, to get to the issue of civilian casualties.
The Guardian let off, saying, you know, a disastrous war looks even more disastrous, and about its second sentence, I have it actually written down here somewhere, says, coalition forces have killed hundreds of civilians in unreported incidents.
They saw, as Americans tend not to, they saw the essence of such wars, which is the killing of civilians, not soldiers or guerrillas, as the basic story, and that's what they forefronted.
And that is an interesting, Americans tend to push aside the issue of what we like to call collateral damage, as if it were not a central issue, but a side issue, you know, a collateral to what's happening.
And that really was a very different approach.
Yeah, well, and of course, as we talked about with the previous guest, Eric Margulies has become the dominant narrative of the whole thing, that, oh my goodness, they're just finding out that the Pakistanis have been backing the Taliban for their own reasons in that country, and I guess, you know, hopefully that doesn't mean that they'll follow the Michael O'Hanlon, Robert Kagan plan to go ahead and launch a full-scale invasion of that poor country.
Well, I think that's inconceivable, actually.
I just don't think they're capable of it.
It's funny that the people at Brookings and AEI seem to think it's worth a trial balloon anyway, isn't it, Tom?
Yeah, but generally they're ready to take over, you know, they're ready to whack Iran too, and I don't think that's going to happen either, at least AEI is.
But I think what will happen is it will put pressure on the Obama administration to put even more pressure on the Pakistanis to do things that they don't want to do, because they're following their own, what we like to call national interests when it's us, and I think it could, in fact, make the war even worse for us.
So I think that, you know, I mean, it's hard to know how all this is going to work out, but it is certainly a major story.
Well, now, one thing that does compare to, because as you said, I think actually this is worth noting for another reason too, that these were secret documents from a pretty low level, mostly written by sergeants and, I think, some lieutenants, not top secret documents.
It kind of undercuts the war party spin, that this is all endangering American soldiers on the ground and that kind of thing.
But the one thing that this certainly does have in common with the Pentagon Papers is the risk that was taken by presumably Bradley Manning, but maybe somebody else in this document dump.
Bradley Manning, of course, is facing 54 years in prison, possibly, for at least downloading files onto his computer and sending at least some of them into Wikileaks.org.
Yes, it's true, and that is similar, although, of course, and we know that at one point the Nixon people were thinking about considering whether to put Ellsberg up on probably treason charges, but it never happened.
I mean, Manning is not going to do as well as Ellsberg, that's for sure.
Well, and to hear Dan Ellsberg tell it, he was facing life in prison, but basically the illegal activities of the Nixon administration so prejudiced the trial that they ended up having to just call it off.
He wasn't even acquitted, they just dismissed it and started over, because I think it came out that Nixon had hired Cuban hitmen to murder Dan Ellsberg, or take him out, I guess was the term, not to dinner.
I'm Scott Worden, I'm talking with Tom Englehart.
He keeps the massive collection of important articles at TomDispatch.com and we feature what he writes at Antiwar.com slash Englehart as well.
And I guess, well, how much time do we have here?
A couple more minutes.
Can we talk a little bit more about Bradley Manning?
And what is it that you know about him, or what do you think you know about him and his motivations thus far?
Because there's been a lot of character assassination against this young man, like he was just fed up and out for revenge for no good reason, Tom.
You know, Scott, this is not something I know a lot about, actually.
So we should probably talk about something else, because I've read the basic stuff, but I have no special insight on Bradley Manning, unfortunately.
I mean, you know, I think it was an important act, whatever his motivation was, to simply begin to release some of the stuff.
I mean, everything that we do, and particularly the kind of small-scale, ongoing, heinous operations, you know, in Afghanistan, Iraq, whatever, is swept under that carpet of national security.
I mean, that's why it's quite startling for the administration to claim that this act is harming national security, because so many ugly things, when you look at these documents, I mean, or what we know of these documents, because I obviously haven't gone and looked at 90,000, 92,000 documents.
Not yet.
So many ugly things are hidden within this.
I mean, you're talking about, you know, so-called targeted killings, assassinations going on, special ops assassinations all over southern Afghanistan, with the endless killing of civilians.
You know, Tom, one of the things that Tom Dispatch has done over the years, which I don't think anybody else has done, is I've kept a reasonable count of how many wedding parties the U.S. Air Force in particular has wiped out in Afghanistan, with one in addition in Iraq, which I find just a shocking figure.
I mean, there are about six of them that we know of.
There may be more.
And this, for instance, this document, well, to me this is no news.
This document has a seventh.
It happened at the hands of Poles, of the Polish contingent of the NATO forces in Afghanistan.
It's called a revenge killing in the documents.
They mortared a town where there had been some IEDs against their troops in the neighborhood, and a wedding was going on, and the wedding got blasted away.
I mean, these sorts of acts, you know, really to claim that releasing these acts harms national security, I mean, it's these acts that harm national security, in fact.
I mean, the real security of Americans, as in fact the Afghan war does, too.
So there we are.
This is Alan Minsky, KPFK Interim Program Director on KPFK Radio 90.7 FM, Los Angeles, 98.7 in Santa Barbara.
We're going to go right back to Scott Horton's interview with Tom Engelhardt.
But first I'm going to give out the phone number, because you out there listening can call in with a question for Tom, for Scott, for myself.
We're talking about WikiLeaks.
We're talking about Afghanistan.
And the number here is 8-9-1-0-1-1.
Call in.
And, again, we're talking about this huge story that broke late last night, 92,000 documents revealed by the organization WikiLeaks from basically the United States military establishment and NATO.
All right.
Now, Tom, from TomDispatch.com, one of the things you were saying there about the civilian casualties, it brought up to my mind all this new document dump and the new focus on civilian casualties in Afghanistan is just how different it actually has been in this war from the Iraq war.
It just seems, if nothing else, from just the volume of reporters who covered Iraq as compared to the Afghan war.
And we kept having, we still have estimates that come forward about the so-called excess deaths from the Iraq war and such like that.
But we really have no idea how many Afghan civilians have been killed over there since the invasion in 2001, do we?
No, I think that's true.
In fact, I mean, I think in many ways we probably have no idea in Iraq either.
I mean, this is almost impossible.
And particularly in a country like Afghanistan, you know, so much of the country is rural.
So much of it is reasonably beyond where any reporter might be.
But what we know from these documents now is there are kind of modest counts that are done.
They're always, they have to be low-ball counts because I suspect in all such situations, significant numbers of deaths aren't reported.
And we know now from these documents that there, I mean, according to The Guardian, there are hundreds of casualties from incidents that were in these things.
And we're not talking about, you know, these are just, even though it's a trillion documents, 92,000 documents, these are just the ones that some guy downloaded.
What we have to imagine is how many of these really are there from 2004 to 2009, which is when they ended, December 2009.
How many documents were generated on what was going on in that war by the U.S. military?
This is, it's not like, I mean, you know, it must be hundreds of thousands.
I mean, who knows?
You know, I mean, some of the horrific deaths like the, some of the cases where, you know, particularly where planes went in or special forces went in and a lot of people died, you know, the documents that must have been generated around them that we don't have, they have to be stunning because the American military almost immediately came up with a story.
You know, it always began, you know, 65 Taliban insurgents killed.
And then news comes that some guy calls in from the Afghan backlands on a cell phone or some governor says something or a police chief or whatever.
And then you get competing stories.
And the U.S. military begins to backtrack a little bit at a time.
And, I mean, these are complicated processes that lead sometimes if the story won't go away to investigations that we never find out about.
Somewhere there are piles of investigations, both in Iraq and Afghanistan, of civilian deaths that were declared that obviously happened at some level, but we've never seen them.
Calling all WikiLeakers.
There we are.
There must be.
I mean, but you have to imagine for just a minute if you have, just to go back to the top secret U.S., the top secret America stuff, the national security, the national intelligence bureaucracy, if you have 800,000 people in that bureaucracy, imagine the documentation there.
I mean, you know, I mean, if it's a bureaucracy to begin with, you know that they're just generating documents.
We do know from that story that they generated 50,000 reports a year.
That is intelligence reports.
I mean, more than any set of human beings could possibly read.
I mean, this is like, it's so crazy, you can't even take it in.
Tom Englehardt, this is Alan Minsky, and the phone lines are absolutely lighting up, people who want to ask questions.
I've only got about 10 minutes, so I'll answer anything within that, and then I've got to go.
That's what we have left in the hour, so that is fantastic.
We're going to start off with Victoria from Long Beach, and Brad Incovina, you will be next.
Victoria from Long Beach, welcome to KPFK.
Hi, Victoria.
Hi, Tom.
Can you please explain to your listeners what the official mission is in Afghanistan and how they're able to continue to sell this to the American people?
Well, the only stated mission in Afghanistan at this point, I mean, the Obama administration thing, is the stuff that we heard from the Bush administration from the beginning, which is we have to continue this war because we have to keep al-Qaeda, of which, according to CIA Director Leon Panetta, there are now maximally, and he thinks there may be less, 50 to 100 operatives, not leaders, but operatives in Afghanistan.
We have to keep al-Qaeda from establishing a safe haven in Afghanistan.
That is the only explanation, and when you think about it nine years later, it's at this point so wacky because I wrote a piece about this recently.
If you imagine that we actually had success in Afghanistan, Petraeus actually does it.
He minimally establishes control over the fifth poorest, second most corrupt country on Earth, the Earth's leading narco state, and we actually had Afghanistan and could deny it to al-Qaeda.
You have al-Qaeda, the real actual al-Qaeda, the old al-Qaeda, across the border, several hundred of them in the Pakistani tribal areas.
You have al-Qaeda groups and wannabes in Yemen, Somalia, so on and so forth, taking one country in the backlands of the world.
What could this possibly mean?
I mean, the real question here, we should stop talking.
It would be nice if we could stop talking about what we should do in Afghanistan and ask for 30 seconds why we're actually in Afghanistan because you're right.
There's this one explanation.
It's old, it's really old, and really tattered at this point, and that's it.
Nothing else is offered.
It is totally absurd, and I'd like to know what's going to happen with places like Yemen.
I don't know.
I mean, the United States cannot.
I mean, we've had two disastrous wars.
It's not like we could take Afghanistan and then take the Pakistani tribal borderlands and then take Yemen and then take, you know, et cetera, et cetera.
As Mr. Spock would say, it's illogical.
Thank you so much, Victoria, from Long Beach.
The number here is 818-985-5735, 818-985-KPFK.
Up next is Brad in Covina.
Yeah, well, first I would like to say thank you to the station, Alan and Tom and Scott, for airing this important part.
Thank you.
I was wondering about the fuller context because we've had recent revelations about the State Secrets Act and the secret war, the budget, there's a secret budget, and also the pressure on news media to embed and to maybe not the alternative media because of wiretap laws and being actually charged with media.
Is there sort of a push for it?
How would you describe all this action happening at once?
Scott, I need some help there.
I had trouble hearing it.
Brad, do you want to rephrase that?
It seems like it's not only on this military, but there's also a big political push in regards to consolidating the government and taking it away from the people and moving in ways that the people may not want and a concerted effort from a variety of sources.
Did you make that out that time, Tom?
It was a little broken up.
Basically, the question was, I guess, just your view of the move of the power away from the people and toward those who already have it all and the rise of, I guess, this military-industrial complex plus that we now have, as you mentioned is profiled in the Washington Post last week.
My book, which you mentioned, The American Way of War, is really about one of the things that Americans live in a peaceful land.
We fight our wars far away, a relatively peaceful land in any case.
And it's very hard for us, it seems to me, to take in that Washington is a war capital.
We are in a state of war, and we are a war state, and we garrison the world in a way that no power has ever done.
And all of those things are actually on the increase right now.
He's right.
The intelligence bureaucracy growing is just one thing.
The Pentagon has grown by leaps and bounds.
You can just run through this, and you have a kind of a war state, which is just growing exponentially.
And then when you think in the world that, increasingly, what Americans produce well are things that go bang in the night, which is, on the one hand, Hollywood, which is still a success globally, and on the other, the weapons makers, because the United States, although it's called the arms trade, it should be called the arms monopoly, because the United States now...
I mean, we are the most advanced weapons-making power on the planet, and we sell these things like mad, so that we control now almost 70% of the global arms trade.
It's quite striking, and unlike, say, the Cold War era, the power that comes in second to us, unbelievably enough, is Italy.
I forget the exact number, but maybe 7%, something like that.
It's so startling.
The Soviet Union is 3.8%.
This is in arms sales.
And Americans are remarkably detached from the ongoing...from war, which has become the norm of our world.
Our wars don't end.
There's no victory anymore.
I mean, the last time there was a genuine victory was really, when you think about it, World War II, if you throw out a few places like Granada, kind of bogus victories.
So we are in a strange war state and war world, and it is growing more powerful.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm here with Alan Minsky, and we're talking with Tom Englehart and taking your phone calls.
He's the author of The American Way of War.
His website is TomDispatch.com, and we're really going over the fallout of this new dump of 92,000 documents by Wikileaks, all of which is available at Guardian.co.uk.
And thank you for all the people who have been holding.
We only have time for one more call, and we'll talk to Matt in Topanga.
Matt, welcome to KPFK.
Well, thank you.
Yeah, excellent show.
And I'm wondering, it's not surprising that the American, what I call the hamburger media, is spinning this in a way of, oh, good Lord, look at what those pesky Pakistanis have done and brushed under the rug the entirety of the atrocities that we've done over there.
I mean, what their suppository will prick.
Is there enough that you guys have seen where some heads may roll or where the corporate media just can't deny, number one, there's no real reason for us to be there, and what we're doing is much more harmful to us and to the Afghanis than ever imagined.
What do you think, Tom?
Is there a tipping point we're reaching here?
I wish I could honestly say that I thought we were at a tipping point.
I think, I mean, sooner or later, because it's obvious that we cannot simply put so much of our wealth into distant wars.
I mean, you know, we have an aging infrastructure.
We've got massive unemployment, relatively speaking, and many other things.
There's no way that we can simply continue to garrison the world, fight these wars, and so on and so forth.
It's like, you know, I often think that if Osama bin Laden could have had a dream of what would have been the best thing that could have happened, it would have been something like what's happened.
The United States drawn into, you know, trillion-dollar wars abroad, you know, that ended nothing, that create endless anxieties, particularly among the Islamic populations in the world.
I mean, you know, this would be a dream.
His only failure, really, is he turned all the people of the Middle East toward Nasrallah instead of himself.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, I'm not thinking so much.
I'm just thinking, you know, this is like, it's like we've done something.
I felt this ever since 9-11.
We've done a series of things to ourselves, although we don't see it yet, that he never, that no group of, you know, 19 terrorists, no matter what set of buildings they took down, could have done to us.
We did it.
We have to.
Yes, we do.
And we have to leave it there, unfortunately.
Tom Englehart, thank you so much for joining us here on KPFK for the second half of this hour.
Okay, bye.
Thank you.
And I'm here with Scott Horton, and Scott and I will be back again this Friday at 5 p.m.as one more time we'll be filling in for Susie Weissman, who is on assignment for Beneath the Surface.
And I want to thank all of our guests this hour, Tom Englehart from TomDispatch.com, the music by Public Enemy, great help from Angela in Master Control, D'Angelo Jones engineering the show.
I want to thank Mr. Margolis, who was on earlier in the hour, and, again, Isabel Garcia from the Coalition of Human Rights in Arizona.
This is Alan Minsky, KPFK Interim Program Director, with Scott Horton.
BradleyManning.org.
There we go.
AntiWar.com is Scott's website.
Up next, Ian Masters with the Daily Briefing.
